“Then you don’t need me to tell you how the lungs burn, how you can’t draw a deep breath because the tubes are raw, and you choke on your own phlegm. He said he dreamt of the scent of violets. And lemons.”

“Nicholas wasn’t that ill. You know it. And I know it now.”

She went over to the window and touched the cat, her face turned away from him. “Don’t ask me about Nicholas Cheney. Or the boy Richard. That’s why you’ve come, I can read it in your eyes. And I’ve listened to the men grumbling on their way to search the moors.”

“Do you plant pansies in your garden?” Rutledge asked, reaching to the rafters to touch the upside down heads of strawflowers, brittle between his fingers.

“They don’t dry well,” she said, straightening up to look at him.

“Do they grow well on the moors?”

“Sometimes they do. Volunteers that the wind blows. Or a bird leaves behind.” She was wary still, but not afraid of these questions. He wondered why. “Pansies like the cool of springtime, and a little shade in the afternoon. If that’s what you’re looking for, find the place where they’d want to grow. Not where someone thought of putting ‘em.”

Rutledge considered her. The old, stooped body, the worn, bright eyes, the knowledge and the experiences of a lifetime fading with age, slipping into forgetfulness.

He remembered a chaplain in the war, at a hasty service for a half-dozen soldiers killed in the shelling. Saying, “They’ll never grow old—never feel fear and cold, hunger or pain, or the sorrows of lost love or the pity of the young. While they have missed much, these men who won’t see their sons in their mothers’ arms, or the moon over a summer sea, or the beauty of a rose, they have what we all look for in the end—eternal springtime. It is not their grief but ours that haunts us.” Oddly enough, it had helped weary men. But not, he thought, the chaplain.

“Has your life been a happy one?” Rutledge asked her.

Shock spread across her face, then lingered in her eyes. “No one ever asked me that before,” she said quietly. “But no. I was never given the choice of happiness. Only of service. I don’t know that I wasn’t better off, come to that. If you feel happiness, you must also feel grief.”

“Did Olivia Marlowe know grief?”

“Miss Livia? She went to funerals like the rest of them, and cried.”

“No. Grief for what her life brought her. Not the paralysis. Not the poetry. Not the dead in her family. But grief for what she was.”